Role of Women in the Maiji and Taisho Periods

Women in Meiji and Taisho Eras

Both the Meiji and the Taisho periods in Japan saw women making some progress toward a more equal place in Japanese society and polity as the country as a whole struggled to create an identity for itself that was both modern and Japanese, a difficult task in a nation (and in an era) in which becoming modernized was seen as equivalent of so many as being equivalent to becoming Westernized. As Gordon, in his 2003 A Modern History of Japan, and Sievers in her 1987 Flowers in Salt argue, these two periods saw greater freedom for Japanese women who began to take a more public role in both the family and the political life of the country. But the gains for women - as for men - were unequal, as both class and region (as well as individual talent an initiative) affected the ability of women to redefine the role that their sex had traditionally held.

The Meiji period, as Gordon outlines in Chapter Five, "The Samurai Revolution," began with a political revolution that returned the country to direct imperial rule under the Emperor Meiji and brought to an end the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The emperor took advantage of the restoration of his power to try to push Japan towards the West and to introduce Western concepts of modernization. The effect - over the period of Meiji rule from 1868-1912 included the rise of a much larger and more powerful middle class in Japan. This came about in no small way because the samurai who lead the restoration understood that their own rising power - as well as that of the imperial house - was dependent upon the diminishment of power by the feudal lords.

The samurai inhabited a patriarchal and martial world, and it can hardly have been their intention to raise the status of women by their actions. But the lessening of the strength of traditional feudal families had as one result an increase in the relative strength of women, if only because their status within feudal households had been so low. In many ways, the position of women in Japan during these two eras appears to be better than perhaps it actually was because, as we study history, we take a relative view, and the role of women in Japan was relatively higher than it had been but - as Sievers (40-1) suggests - this relative improvement in the status of Japanese women was still small in absolute terms.

The samurai who brought about the Meiji restoration under the slogan of "a wealthy country and strong arms" also helped to bring about a substantial increase in the degree of urbanization of the Japanese population (as Gordon describes in Chapter Seven, "Social, Economic, and Cultural Transformations"). Many families left the country towns where they had lived for generations even as many of the country's elite moved to Tokyo as the capital of the nation shifted to the city once known as Edo.

This combination of increased urbanization along with a higher degree of mobility tended to loosen the traditional strictures on women's physical and social mobility. Japan certainly did not become overnight the nation of relative strangers living today that marks contemporary American society, but it did become a society in which people had a greater degree of freedom from the oversight of their extended families. As Sievers notes, this tended to benefit both men and women in terms of their individual freedom and status, but it tended to benefit women more because they had had so very little freedom in feudal, rural life.

The Meiji period was one of almost continual uprisings at least in the 19th century, and these revolutions had the effect of improving the position of Japanese women, especially vis-a-vis the men in their own social class. The status of women tended to benefit from the increasingly (in the 1870s and the 1880s) frequent and determined calls for a more open form of government. As more and more ideas about constitutional government, individual rights and freedom of expression were introduced from the West, larger and larger numbers of Japanese began to push for substantial governmental reform. Japanese citizens began to ask for a constitution similar to that of Western nations that would give them greater power vis-a-vis their government than had been thinkable only a few decades before.

As middle-class men lobbied for greater rights for themselves, their calls for freedom began to spill over to include women in a situation that was in many ways analogous to what happened in the United States in the middle decades of the 19th century when the fight for the freeing of slaves and their enfranchisement expanded to include a fight for women's rights and their enfranchisement.

This is not to say, as Sievers makes quite clear, that the status of women in Japan during the Meiji Period or the Taisho Period was close to being equal to the status of men. But this does not mean that we should discount the real gains made by women during this period. Both of these periods saw a significant ability of Japanese women to become engaged in the public life of their times. They moved from the traditional, feudal, rural position of women which was "shufu," or a place "deep in the inside of the home" to a position at least within their own households in which women might begin to define for themselves their own goals and their own dreams. This ability to determine their own paths - even to this small a degree - was a significant step forward.